staticassertion

I'm in agreement. It's the article that made the sweeping statement.

Hey, fair enough! To each their own.

Was cost the reason you went for it over tirzepitide? I feel like retatrutide is still way too early to mess with, it's giving me real "vioxx" vibes of messing with too much at once.

> these are not drugs that anyone can safely take without guidance.

Unless that risk is egregious, informed adults should be able to accept it if they so choose.

I assume they're referring to the brief bit in the post that indicates that oral ingestion leads to a breakdown that makes oral supplements of amino acids pointless. They say it very briefly and they don't really outright assert it, it's just a sort of implied aside.

Even if you hadn't lost any muscle mass, zero chance you're going to see the same exercise performance on a calorie deficit.

The article frames these supplements as being purely appealing to "anti science" people but I think that's really unfair. You can believe in medication, believe in science, trust government systems, etc, and still feel like you're not being served by the medically approved options.

I think it's disingenuous to frame this exclusively in terms of the people who are turning down medically approved options for unknown supplements.

Dealing with doctors is kind of a pain in the ass. I was very sick a month ago and my doctor is pretty "anti antibiotics", he wanted me to go over for an in person check-in. This was after 10 days of having symptoms that I did everything reasonable to take care of. I got on a call with another doctor (at a perfectly reputable hospital) who immediately prescribed antibiotics. It took 5 days of antibiotics just to feel somewhat better - all while using saline rinses, showering, sleeping, eating properly, etc. I still have a lingering cough. I am very reluctant to take antibiotics unless it really feels necessary, this was easily the worst sinus infection of my adult life.

My friend wanted to try out a weight loss medication. Their doctor refused because they felt that my friend hadn't tried hard enough without it. So they got some from another friend who hadn't ended their prescription because they also were worried of being cut off. They've lost weight, which has motivated them to exercise more, eat better, and are generally happier and healthier.

From the article,

> Unfortunately, point two is that we barely have any of these effects worked out - at least not to the degree that you would want before you start injecting them into your leg.

This is what was said to a friend whose doctor took them off of one of those GLP medications, basically. They didn't have enough evidence to know the risks of continued use, even at lower doses.

The reality is simply that there's a big gap right now between what people want and what people have access to. The supplement industry exists to fill that gap.

Medical professionals can complain about users taking these peptides, but plenty of people are not "anti medicine" while still feeling underserved. If doctors aren't in a position to have these conversations, people will go to Youtube or wherever else to look for answers.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about a number of medications requiring a prescription. I frankly do not see why my doctor is involved in me taking a drug unless it would be negligent to allow me to or if it would have community health impacts (ie: antibiotic resistant strains etc). I'm an adult, if I've been properly informed of risks, etc, then I'm inclined to say that it should be up to me to pay full price for some medication or not.

I know plenty of people getting their GLP1 from compound pharmacies. None of them went their first, their doctors wouldn't give them the medication (sometimes they were just a pound under the BMI limit, often because they had been slowly losing weight) so they went elsewhere. These aren't anti-vaxxers who won't take their medication, they're people who want help and there's a gap that companies are taking advantage of. The medical establishment needs to find a way to address that. Right now the answer appears to be compound pharmacies and nurse practitioners.

> In my own view (and it ain’t just me) you also have regulatory agencies to force people to show that their drugs actually have some benefit before they can sell them, too. But that’s going further and further out of fashion. Can’t get ahold of the New Hotness to inject into your upper thigh if there are a bunch of stick-in-the-mud folks asking for human data, infringing on your freedom and all.

Many of us will be dead before there's a medically approved treatment for something. Hell, I got eye surgery before it was FDA approved - I'd probably be blind (or at least far worse off) if I'd waited the years it took.

How many people taking supplements are "naturopaths" who reject modern medicine as opposed to just people who want to be healthier? I really wonder that.

Sounds like there's some debate to be had here...

> It's really not. A service adds complexity. If you have no reason to add it besides to "reduce complexity" - that is an oxymoron.

No, it really is. I can just as easily say that a system is simpler when it's composite parts are isolated, or that a system is simpler if I can take one component and reason about it in isolation, etc.

Similarly, I could say that libraries add or reduce complexity by making similar appeals like "a single unit of code is simpler" or "separate, smaller units are simpler" etc.

I have wondered this as well. Maybe it's trying to train based on which accounts get flagged/ time-to-flag or something? Otherwise... who would bother with this? It's so dumb.

This is also extremely common with LLMs, in my experience. They grep, find something, make it `pub`, etc.

Great, then I'll tell you. It's a bunch of FedRAMP certified Microsoft services.

> Aren't libraries just "services" without some transport layer / gateway?

Libraries can share memory, mutable state, etc. Services can not.

> (it inherently does not)

That's going to be debatable.

What's the most common architecture you see for CMMC enclaves, especially those built by outside consulting firms?

The "time" part is what I don't get. If you want to say that "resetting and reingesting all context fresh" somehow causes a problem, that I can see. If you want to say that the immutability of the weights is a problem, okay great I'm probably with you there too. "Time" seems irrelevant.

I'm not understanding how this is analogous to being killed every 5 seconds as opposed to being paused. Let's call it N seconds, unless you think length matters?

> And that computation is equivalent to reading the compressed form of a giant look-up table, not something essential to its behavior in a mathematical sense.

Sure, that's a totally separate issue though.

I noted that there are people who work on designing those sorts of tests and answering these questions and then I described what good evidence would look like.

So what? If a human were unconscious every 5 seconds for 100ms, would you say they are "less conscious"? Tokens are still causally connected, which feels sufficient.

As opposed to what? There are still causal connections, which feel sufficient. A presentist would reject the concept of multiple "times" to begin with.

> If we think of human emotions the same way, just evolution's way of nudging behavior

I think we basically do, the only interesting bit is our perception of phenomenal experiences.

There are fields that focus on these areas and numerous ideas around what the criteria would be. One of the common understandings is that recurrent processing is likely a foundational layer for consciousness, and agents do not have this currently.

I'd say that in terms of evidence I'd want to establish specific functional criteria that seem related to consciousness and then try to establish those criteria existing in agents. If we can do so, then they're conscious. My layman understanding is that they don't really come close to some of the fairly fundamental assumptions.

Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of frameworks for this that have already been applied to LLMs.

What do you mean exist outside of time? They definitely don't exist outside of any causal chain - tokens follow other tokens in order.

Gaps in which no processing occurs seems sort of irrelevant to me.

The main limitation I'd point to if I wanted to reject LLMs being conscious is that they're minimally recurrent if at all.

I have no idea what you're talking about. This has nothing to do with having "better fedramp certs". If you are setting up fedramp or cmmc you will be heavily, heavily pressured and incentivized to do so with Microsoft tooling.

"Better" isn't relevant, which is my entire point. The reason people choose Microsoft isn't "it's better for this", it's because every consultancy out there, every government agency or affiliate, etc, is going to push Microsoft very very hard.

This isn't it at all. AWS does not have the same sorts of insane cross-tenancy exploits that Azure has had, for example.

The reason that Azure has so many customers is very simply because Azure is borderline mandated by the US government.

Depending on the space you work in, you have almost no choice at all. If you're building for government then you're going to use Microsoft, almost "end of story".

It is so hard to test those codebases too. A lot of the time there's IO and implicit state changes through the code. Even getting testing in place, let alone good testing, is often an incredibly difficult task. And no one will refactor the code to make testing easier because they're too afraid to break the code.

It "means nothing" that the way that government systems get set up for government data is all using Microsoft tooling?

> I've been involved with FEDRAMP initiatives in the past. That doesn't mean as much as you'd think. Some really atrocious systems have been FEDRAMP certified. Maybe when you go all the way to FEDRAMP High there could be some better guardrails; I doubt it.

I never said otherwise. I said that Microsoft services are the defacto tools for FEDRAMP. I never implied that those environments are some super high standard of safety. But obviously if the tools used for every government environment are fundamentally unsafe, that's a massive national security problem.

> Microsoft has just been entrenched in the government, that's all.

Yes, this is what I was saying.

> The author does mention rewriting subsystem by subsystem while keeping the functionality intact, adding a proper messaging layer, until the remaining systems are just a shell of what they once were. That sounds reasonable.

It sounds reasonable, it's just hard to say without more insight. We're getting one side of things.

> The current plans are likely to fail — history has proven that hunch correct — so I began creating new ones to rebuild the Azure node stack from first principles.

> A simple cross-platform component model to create portable modules that could be built for both Windows and Linux, and a new message bus communication system spanning the entire node, where agents could freely communicate across guest, host, and SoC boundaries, were the foundational elements of a new node platform

Yes, I read that part as well and found it a bit confusing to reconcile with this one.

The vibe from my quotes is very much "I had a simple from-scratch solution". They mention then slowly adopting it, but it's very hard to really assess this based on just the perspective of the author.

He also was making suggestions about significantly slowing down development and not pursuing major deals, which I think again is not necessarily wrong but was likely to fall on deaf ears.